Management of the Electrical and Thermal Demand of a Social Housing in Argentina

Procrear is a social housing program in Argentina that has delivered tens of thousands of homes to families across the country. In the province of Córdoba, the thermal conditioning requirement for these houses is elevated, due to the weather, and consequently the consume for energy as well. In this article the thermal behavior of a reference house of this program (Pampeana Norte I) is analyzed through an equivalent resistive-capacitive dynamic model. Additionally, a strategy to optimize thermal and electrical management under a time-of-use pricing scheme is proposed. The optimization strategy, based on a genetic algorithm, and the developed RC model, aims to improve human thermal comfort and minimize electricity costs. The optimization determines the temperature limits of air conditioning units and includes the management of the start time of three devices which are time-shiftable. Finally, this strategy is compared to another non-optimized control strategy, improving the average thermal comfort in a 39% and reducing the electrical cost near of 16%. In conclusion, the dynamic simulations show that the trade-off between thermal comfort and electricity costs can result in a win-win strategy by optimizing the air-conditioning unit usage.